It seems like every time I look at the news there’s an article about one of two huge disturbing trends:
An obsessive drive for efficiency and optimization (I’m looking at you, DOGE)
Epic loneliness, disengagement and mistrust across demographics
These may seem unrelated, but there is actually a direct cause-and-effect relationship. Let me put on my tin foil hat and explain. First up, my beef with efficiency.
The Dark Side of Maximized Efficiency
Sure, efficiency sounds like a good thing at first. What could be sinister about finding the perfect balance of effort and reward, and trying to make the most of your time?
A lot, actually.
Efficiency should never be the end goal: it should be a tactic to accomplish a goal. For example, if you have 15 things on your to-do list for the day, your goal is to cross off every item on the list by the end of the day. Efficiency might mean getting them done in the shortest amount of time, or minimizing driving time between errands, or spending the least amount of money. You get to decide what success looks like, and define efficiency in that context.
The dark side creeps in when someone other than you (i.e. your boss, corporate leaders, app developers, greedy egomaniacal billionaire entrepreneurs, etc.) gets to define efficiency and you become an expendable commodity to be optimized in pursuit of someone else’s goal.
[Side note: I hate the word ‘optimize’ when it is applied to anything having to do with human behavior. I’ll come back to this point later.]
When used in the workplace, efficiency is almost always connected with maximizing profits and/or minimizing expenses, creating the need to track and measure and quantify everything - even - and especially - human behavior. Very rarely is it in a context of making your work less stressful, more meaningful, or more likely to be successful.
Efficiency Leads to Optimization…
So much technology is designed for this exact purpose: ensuring that we humans make the “best” use of every second of our time.
Technology promised to help us be more intentional with our time so we have more of it to spend on the things we value the most. It has to some degree, but largely it’s gotten us addicted to the idea that every aspect of our lives - how we spend our time, how many and what kinds of calories/nutrients we consume, how many steps we take, the number of lattes we’ve purchased, and so on - can be optimized. We are made to believe that there is an ideal way to do everything, the amount of time or money to spend on it, the hyper-specific and standardized input or output to expect. We now try to optimize in every area of our lives, so much so that a lot of the time we “saved” by being efficient is now spent searching for more efficiency hacks and stressing over tracking the metrics and meeting the goals.
These tech tools - and the content they deliver - weren’t really designed to help us become better versions of ourselves, personally or professionally. They were designed to make more money for the companies who own them. These apps make us, specifically our precious time and attention - the metric of their pursuit of optimized efficiency and profitability.
…and Displaces What’s Really Important
What this drive for efficiency and optimization of our time has done is replace that extra time on things that are meaningful, at work or otherwise, with these attention-sucking apps and hacks.
At work, we’re directed to spend time on the things that are considered productive, which means they can be quantified, but don’t often mean much. How many of us have to track our time in arbitrary intervals to prove we’re working a full 8-ish hours, but we could actually get our workload done in 5 hours? Or how many different software programs do we use for project management that take up a ton of time, instead of just having conversations with the people we work with, adding to our frustration at work?
At home, we’re tracking our breathing, heart rate, steps, sleep, calories, body fat, minutes meditating, seconds until we can put the kids to bed. We’re obsessed with metrics to be more efficient, and it’s taking us away from things that make us happy: spending time with loved ones, engaging in our hobbies, volunteering in our communities, sleeping….
The drive for efficiency makes us focus so much on ourselves, or creating the optimized version of ourselves, that it gets in the way of the things that make us happy. So we feel more alone, anxious, and checked-out from our actual lives.
Things that make us happy also make us healthy, especially spending time with people. Having close relationships is a top indicator of longevity. Having friends at work is a top indicator of employee engagement and retention.
Instead of nurturing our close friendship, we send bajillions of texts lamenting that we don’t have time to hang out. Taking 2 seconds out to share a reel with someone we love now counts as keeping in touch. And we spend hours doing these tiny micro connections instead of actually spending an hour or two with our favorite humans.
Doesn’t that make you sad? It makes me sad. And mad.
Prioritize Efficiency for What’s Important to YOU
I think we’d all be a lot better off if we stop trying to be efficient, and instead just focus on being ourselves. Instead of focusing so much on doing things the fastest and mostest, measure your success by how much joy you have in a day, by how many relationships you nurtured in a week, by how much time you spend on something personally fulfilling.